Blog

August 2018

One of our clients recently canceled their contract with us. While we’re sad to see them go, we recognize that their business has changed in the time we’ve been working with them-more than a decade, actually.

This particular company was focused on IT services for public school systems and providing a way to keep everything running smoothly without the school system requiring an on-site IT staff. Schools have a lot of data. In the old days, all of the technology to store and process that data was on-premise in the building and had to be maintained by either a team of staff members or an outsourced company.

This client of ours launched a new service in the early 2000s that took all of that data and moved it off-site. Basically, it was a cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) long before we had labels for either of those things. They were frontrunners in that regard. And it was a multi-tenant database before that was normal, too. Each school only saw their own data, but it was all in the same system.

Our company was involved pretty early on in helping them design the database, then there was a short period where another company supported their database before we returned to providing that service. In the almost 20-year history of the company, there were only three database administrators that worked on that project.

That makes a big difference in consistency of a product. It also made it pretty seamless at the end of each school year when things needed to be closed out.

Today, there are a lot of competing systems out there, so this client decided to stop investing in that particular product and move on to other areas of innovation for them. As fast as technology is growing, even the greatest new idea doesn’t stay new for very long. Software as a service is an incredibly competitive field, and that’s a good thing really.

So while we’re always sad to lose a client, we’re also celebrating their long-running success in their industry and their recognition that it’s time to move on to other things.

One of our clients, the Oklahoma Public Employees Retirement System (OPERS), needed to buy some new hardware and do a hardware migration. Some changes in licensing requirements and the need to be in full compliance were motivating the switch. Their internal team priced out options for the hardware migration but also priced out options for moving to the cloud.

They got some pretty impressive pricing for moving the system to the cloud and felt like it was too good to refuse. They hadn’t really explored moving to the cloud before, so they didn’t know what it would cost until they priced it out.

They brought us in as an advisor to verify that the cloud-based resources they were looking at would be adequate. Before spending the money and taking the time to make the switch, they wanted to be sure we didn’t see any issues. And we didn’t.

This situation is a little bit like when you have to take an old car to the shop multiple times for expensive repairs and start to wonder if you should just buy a new car. And then you find out that new car is much cheaper than you ever imagined, plus it’s going to do everything you need it to do. Seems like an easy decision, right?

OPERS switched to what’s called IAAS and DAAS-infrastructure as a service and database as a service. They set up their web server infrastructure and initially thought they would have to pay for new database licenses, but then they learned they could simply transfer their existing licensing. It’s nice when initial perceptions of the cost of a project are way off once you’re really looking at the numbers. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s nice when it does.

Do you have an area where you’re hanging on to the old way because you assume the new way will be too expensive? Try pricing it out, and you might be surprised at how affordable some of the cloud-based options are. But like OPERS, be sure to consult an IT professional to ensure it’s the right move for your business.